Banks provide financial services to their customers such as lending money. Banks need to know the financial condition of their customers prior to making loans to them to determine the credit risk associated with making the loans. Banks also need to know the financial needs of their customers to provide them with the proper services.
In the past, reports concerning the financial condition and needs of bank customers, such as merchants, were compiled and then printed and mailed to the banks. A problem with this approach includes the cost of producing and distributing the reports to the banks along with the timeliness of the information contained in the reports.
What is needed is a method of providing a graphical user interface of a merchant database to banks via the WWW.